Jude Marr’s chapbook Breakfast for the Birds honors the world that the poet passes through, gifting it with her close attention. Her poems shine with a subtle luminescence that shifts to reveal a cutting, faceted edge once examined in the light. And this is her indomitable gift to the reader: comfort and disquiet served in equal measure as we travel through poems that build with a quiet intensity, offering up journeys of struggle, of opacity, of freedom and a longing that illuminates what it means to be human.

—Mary Akers, author of the short story collections Women Up On Blocks and Bones of an Inland Sea

Marr’s stylish, well-traveled poems reward close reading. They lean towards spare, even cool to the touch—but their speakers walk on coals.

—Laura Newbern, author of Love and the Eye

In Jude Marr’s chapbook Breakfast for the Birds, one can get distracted by the careful compositions, delicate yet stinging word choices, and internal rhymes that seem natural not forced-- but don’t. Read and read again for the moments of connection that speak of the desire to be truly seen, accepted and even yearned for. Wonderful work.